I struggled initially to understand why the participle is in gen., but I looked at my commentaryfor clarification (just like the other sentence, the verb δεῖ is impersonal, and because of ἐμήν,the part. must agree with gen. case).

But I cannot understand why the purpose clause would be in the opt. My commentary saysthat because the participle πονοῦντος stands for ὅς...ἐπόνουν (I suck at relatives...i don't get why ὅς and not οὕς)the verb in the purpose clause is in the opt. in place of the subj. I do not understandwhy a secondary clause as ὥσπερ would have such effect on the main sentence.

NateD26 wrote:I struggled initially to understand why the participle is in gen., but I looked at my commentaryfor clarification (just like the other sentence, the verb δεῖ is impersonal, and because of ἐμήν,the part. must agree with gen. case).

I honestly find this one of the more unnatural aspect of Greek syntax. Always trips me up.

But I cannot understand why the purpose clause would be in the opt. My commentary saysthat because the participle πονοῦντος stands for ὅς...ἐπόνουν (I suck at relatives...i don't get why ὅς and not οὕς)the verb in the purpose clause is in the opt. in place of the subj. I do not understandwhy a secondary clause as ὥσπερ would have such effect on the main sentence.

The explanation is implying that ἵνα belongs to subordinate clause, i.e., he was labouring in order to (here = with the result that) the oracle...

Thanks, modus. Just if it's ok to ask about the relative clause. i always get confused by the choice of the relative pronoun.Does the commentary mean ὥσπερ ὃς πόνους τινὰς ἐπόνουν? If I take out the object, should it be πόνους τινὰς οὓς ἐπόνουν?

Sorry, I somehow missed that entirely. It has to be ὅς because the structure of the relative clause is basically πλάνην ἐμοῦ, ὃς πόνους ἐπόνουν. If you take out the object it would be οὓς but that wouldn't fit into this particular sentence.

But I'm not really sure how to fill in the actual sentence. It seems to me that it would be something like ὥσπερ ἀνθρώπου ὅς πόνους τινὰς ἐπόνει, but I may just be unfamiliar with the Greek usage here. I couldn't find very any examples of ὤσπερ with the relative clause -- it seems the participle is the usual thing.

I'm reviewing this part and It seems to me that the sole purpose of his "Herculean labors"was to refute the oracle. He didn't believe himself that he was the wisest man on earth,so he embarked on a journey to prove the oracle wrong.

The opposite result of these labors, the oracle being irrefutable, is the purpose of presenting them to the jury.It was never the purpose of the labors themselves.

This could be a case where you have "attraction" even though it's not strictly grammatical, so here by the time you reach ἵνα, the sentence has a past "flavour" which causes the shift. It's not a very satisfying explanation in my opinion but sometimes it seems to be the only one.

But I think this passage is difficult to understand in any case and I've seen different explanations. One is that he's just being ironic. Another is that he is saying that the purpose of his labours was in fact to make the passage irrefutable for himself, in the sense of he was trying to understand what it means, so it's not really contradicting what he said before. It's also been amended to ἵνα μή μοι but I don't think that's any better really.